Okayama Art Summit 2016: Japan's New Triennial Contemporary Art Exhibition BY CLAIRE BOUCHARA | JULY 21, 2016 Lawrence Weiner, “1/2 Begun 1/2 Finished Whensoever," 2008 / 2016, Language + The Materials Referred, Mock-up photograph A new triennial contemporary art exhibition will soon be held in Okayama, Japan. Okayama Art Summit 2016 will have its first edition from October 9 through November 27, 2016, organized by the Okayama Art Summit Executive Committee and directed by New York artist Liam Gillick. Gillick has recently announced the artist lineup, featuring 31 contemporary artists, as well as the theme for 2016 surrounding the concept of development. Yu Araki, Trisha Baga, Noah Barker, Robert Barry, Anna Blessmann and Peter Saville, Angela Bulloch, Michael Craig-Martin, Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Simon Fujiwara, Ran Gander, Melanie Gilligan, Rochelle Goldberg, and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster are some of the many international talents who will be participating in the event. Considering the Japanese city’s particular history in urban development, Okayama is an ideal location to explore such a concept and provide different levels of interpretation. Selected artists will create bodies of work which will either be in perma- nent development or continuously look back on the conditions of their production. All the artists have been selected for the distinctive way in which they play with various structures — ideological, formal or political — and they will provide many levels of exploration and experience for the viewer. Additionally, Gillick plans for the audience to view the concept of “Development” in its cinematic sense, and the event will consequently offer two ways to encounter the works. “Taking the first route, a single visitor can take the role of an individual ‘camera’ – seeing the city and the artworks from specif- ic points of view. Taking the second route, groups of visitors function as collective subjects,” said Liam Gillick in a statement. The experience of the exhibition will thus be based on a collective effort to guide each visitor as “cameras or subjects.” As viewers travel from one site to another, they will come across different layers of change, modernization, and reconstruction — aspects that are inextricably linked with the contemporary Japanese city. “Okayama Summit 2016: ‘Developments’” will run from October 9 through November 27 throughout Okayama, Japan. Bouchara, Claire, “Okayama Art Summit 2016: Japan’s New Triennial Contemporary Art Exhibition”, Blouin Artinfo (online), July 21, 2016 ROLE PLAY by Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Thomas Demand, Barbara Bloom, Christian Jankowski, Elmgreen&Dragset, Michelle Grabner, Tobias Re- hberger, Ugo Rondinone, Harrell Fletcher, John Miller, Paulina Olowska We asked twelve artists who have also curated exhibitions the following questions: 1) There are more and more large scale shows curated by artists; why do you think that is? 2) Could you please expand upon your experience and what you see around you, regarding this trend? LIAM GILLICK Liam Gillick, Scale Model Of A Social Center For Teenagers For Milan 1993 (Porto), 2016 “Campaign” installation view at Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto, 2016. © Liam Gillick. Courtesy: the artist. Photo: Filipe Braga In the last two or three years I have thought about this question a lot. So I wrote two texts. They contradict each other. There is no resolution. One thing that has stressed curating as we have known it over the last twenty years has been the emergence of a new Contemporary Art History challenging the critical theory base of “the curatorial” moment of apparent freedom and loose collaboration. Here are the more pertinent parts of those two texts—for comparison. Complete Over the past twenty five years, the complete curator has emerged as an agent within cultural practice. This heightened in- dividual or group demonstrates varied responses to ethical demands exceeding those being produced by artists, and posits new models in advance of art being made today. Bypassing the complexities and dead-ends produced by attempting to match theories to forms—curatorial conceptualization runs ahead—dragging desire for new structures into direct confrontation with theoretical (philosophical, sociological and psychological) constructions. The complete curator expresses disappointment with current art in its glossier, petulant and uninhibited forms and weariness with art’s inability to produce new societies and new relationships. It does so alongside a revived critical community, bolstered by the academy and the rise of contemporary art as an area of advanced study. The complete curator desires a world —expressed and realised by art, artists and themselves—which expels the present domination of capital via the machinations of neoliberalism. The complete curator has no need to build new critical models restricted to art in object or structural form, for they gain momentum from art’s lack and the increasingly precise description of societies’ needs. It is not that the complete curator is incapable of deconstructing art’s often wry and self-abasing engagements; rather, such an exercise has become pointless in the face of a new conversation with the academy and its own self-conscious institutions. Incomplete The incomplete curator is aware of shifting curatorial scope. They do not see their work as the production of encyclopedic knowledge. They say to themselves “To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only pretended to pretend.” (Jacques Derrida) The incomplete curator is part of a curatorial mass. They know that there are an infinite number of other curators. They look in the mirror and recite the words “To say ‘we’ and mean ‘I’ is one of the most recondite insults.” (Theodor Adorno) The incomplete curator is under pressure to prove capable of an academic method. Yet they ignore the shadow of correct tech- nique. With tears in their eyes they shout “The point is not to stay marginal, but to participate in whatever network of marginal zones is spawned from other disciplinary centers and which, together, constitute a multiple displacement of those authorities.” (Judith Butler) The incomplete curator smiles at the idea of faith, hope, and charity. While at the same time telling artists about all the artists they do not know about, and all the books they have not read. There is no contradiction here: “What I claim is to live to the full the contradiction of my time, which may well make sarcasm the condition of truth.” (Roland Barthes) The incomplete curator is an agent of compromise. Reveling in an acceptance of the limits of any given structure. For the incomplete curator understands that “All forms of consensus are by necessity based on acts of exclusion.” (Chantal Mouffe) The incomplete curator works hard toward the end of withering the museum as a cultural “state.” They make use of entryist strategies at any given moment. For them a foundational truth is that “The paradigmatic body of Western control societies is no longer represented by the impris- oned body of the worker, the lunatic, the ill person, but rather by the obese (full of the worlds of the enterprise) or anorectic (rejection of this world) body, which see the bodies of humanity scourged by hunger, violence and thirst on television. The para- digmatic body of our societies is no longer the mute body molded by discipline, but rather it is the bodies and souls marked by the signs, words and images (company logos) that are inscribed in us—similar to the procedure, through which the machine in Kafka’s ‘Penal Colony’ inscribes its commands into the skin of the condemned.” (Maurizio Lazzarato) The incomplete curator is not without an aesthetic dimension. The incomplete curator demonstrates a desire to recognize an aesthetic dimension in loca- tions that are not limited to the work or the location of work at any given moment. For the incomplete curator “Artistic subjectivity without content is now the pure force of negation that everywhere and at all times affirms only itself as absolute freedom that mirrors itself in pure self-consciousness.” (Giorgio Agamben) Gillick, Liam, “Role Play”, Mousse, Issue 54, June 2016 “The Trick Was Always to Start as if You Were Halfway Through. Liam Gillick in Conversation with Rachel Rose.”, Modern Matter, Issue 10, pg. 162-177 LIAM GILLICK: CAMPAIGN FROM 28 JAN 2016 TO 03 JAN 2017 AN EXHIBITION IN FOUR MOMENTS This first exhibition in Portugal of Liam Gillick (1964, Aylesbury, UK) takes the form of an evolving presentation over one year that reflects Gillick’s long-standing engagement with questions of process, participation, collectivity and decision-making, and of which his varied approach to language and the language of space is an expression. In ‘Campaign’ Gillick presents a progressive overlaying of spatial and performative situations, including sound, sculptural and text-based works that have existed as early prototypes or sketches, but have never been produced on the architectural scale for which they were initially intended. In these works, Gillick poetically addresses themes such as time, history and duration, and the visual and spatial codes of the social. ‘Campaign’ is organized by the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto and is curated by Suzanne Cotter, Director, as- sisted by exhibition curator Filipa Loureiro. Martin Herbert picks ten shows on through March 2016 you don't want to miss By Martin Herbert Liam Gillick, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto through 3 January 2017 ‘Liam Gillick already noticed that conceptual art basically no longer existed after the 1960s and 1970s’, remarks FLUIDITY’s advance info, noting that afterwards global capitalism simply swallowed art up: it was no more. In lieu of making standalone works of conceptual art, Gillick is currently embarked upon Campaign, a yearlong processual work for the Serralves Museum, Porto, involving fluctuating sculp-tural interventions in the gallery: ‘spatial and performative situations’ tracking back to works that Gillick has made or contemplated making since the 1990s.